Pat Casey (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for all of the information he has supplied us with in the past 24 hours. There is a lot of detail to get through. I will start with homelessness. I want to acknowledge the work that has been done in the area. The Minister said more than 2,080 families have been taken out of emergency accommodation and now have secure tenure, something which we must acknowledge. I understand it is a 50% increase on what was achieved in the previous year. The most frustrating thing from everybody's point of view is that the 2,080 families who have been housed have been replaced by another 2,080 families. We seem to be going around in circles in regard to the homelessness figures. At times there is too much information.

The Minister's statement concerned me with regard to why people are becoming homeless. He said the report examined the reasons families become homeless, with the vast bulk of presentations relating to family circumstances or issues with private rental accommodation. I do not know for how many years there has been a housing crisis. I am very disappointed that the Minister said that the data collected in regard to the presentations arising from issues with private rental accommodation is not detailed enough. In fairness, we are five or six years into a homelessness crisis and still do not have the correct information to enable us to make the right decision, which is disappointing.

Everybody has spoken about the quarterly and monthly figures. I will not get into the details. We have all been used to monthly figures and a move away from them could cause certain ramifications which would be unnecessary and would take away the focus from the real issues in respect of homelessness.

The Minister might give committee some more information on one matter. He said new presentations in respect of homelessness will not be going into hotels. Can he expand on that statement? Regrettably, we are still using hotels too much.

Everybody has spoken about HAP. It is time to get rid of the HAP transfer list and put everybody on the one list. I know of constituents who are genuinely afraid to go on to HAP because of their fear that they will not be considered for the social housing allocation. There is genuine concern about that. There are complications in moving from one local authority area to another, whether one is in the HAP scheme or on the general council housing list. If I want to move from Dublin to Wicklow I will start all over again. Local authority synergies need to be expanded so that people have more options than just the local authority area in which they are living and can transfer credits they have built up to another area.

It is disappointing that another glaring thing that came out of the report was just left there on its own. There was a 19% refusal rate for offers of permanent social housing and no detail was given as to why there were refusals. We have spoken about how choice-based letting seems to be much more successful than the general allocation. I think that statement is on page 8 of the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive, DRHE, report. It is left there in bold and it does not get into the detail of why. I think we need to get a much better understanding of the reasons people are refusing permanent accommodation. In another section, I think the witnesses refer to where 595 offers of permanent social housing were made to homeless people in 2017. I will not say that people are gaming the systems because we have had that debate, but that seems quite high relative to the number of people who are on the homeless list. Some 595 people were offered permanent solutions, yet there are only approximately 3,500 adults on the list in Dublin. If I was a gambling man, I would have a better chance on the homeless list than I would on the housing list. We need to clarify exactly what is happening with that.

Another issue, which I think the Minister, Deputy Murphy, mentioned, relates to non-nationals. The DRHE also received a small number of referrals of non-Irish national families living in extremely overcrowded, substandard accommodation. Do we have any knowledge of the breadth of that or the depth of what is happening with non-nationals? It refers only to a small number of referrals and we all know that it is much bigger than what is being referred to here.